Content marketing strategies should constantly evolve with the times; marketers must adapt to trends, algorithm updates, new platforms and styles that crop up in the industry. While certain fundamentals will remain, the opportunity to tweak their approaches should excite those who create and implement them.
In this article, we’ll discuss four key content marketing trends for the year ahead, so you can create a successful strategy in 2023.
Emotion and authenticity
Gone is the day when businesses would stick to a formal and professional tone. While that may be suitable in some industries, as consumers, we still expect to find an authentic human connection with any brands we encounter. Ensuring you’re offering genuine, transparent and relatable content backed by emotion means it will resonate with your readers and you’ll start to build that relationship.
This all comes back to one of the fundamentals of content marketing that has been popularised in recent years thanks to some of the latest Google updates – writing for the person and not the search engine. In doing this, an emotive human tone of voice is sure to come through in your content naturally.
Shift your KPI focus
Although ranking highly is one of the most important performance indicators within search marketing, it shouldn’t be the only metric that you’re tracking. Watching your site climb the SERPs is something tangible that allows you or your client to see the progression of your business. This is aided by creating high-quality content that users find useful, so how else can we track this?
Keeping an eye on other site measurements including click-through and bounce rates will help you to decipher what content your audience is engaging with, and where you need to focus your attention.
Visual and diversified content
It’s no secret that many of us are visual learners. Increasingly today, thanks to the explosion of visual content on social media, we’re far more likely to engage with and retain information that we learn through a visual medium.
Not only this but employing a range of content styles will work in your favour in 2023. The more compelling and varied your copy, the more interested your audience will be. There’s an abundance of media available to present your content in a different way – infographics, video and audio are all at your fingertips.
AI-powered content strategies
One of the largest trends to appear on the content marketing scene recently is artificial intelligence (AI) and all of its potential uses. As ads for high-quality, AI-written articles suddenly started to appear on our feeds, the industry has been buzzing with how best to utilise such technology.
Now, we’re not suggesting that you allow all of your content to be created by AI – there’s no substitute for a skilled content writer. Rather, AI technology can be used to aid this process in research, data collation, strategy creation and optimisation. Time-consuming keyword research could be made much quicker, while content briefs can be created at the touch of a button. Topic research will become simple, as your AI programme searches the web for you in seconds. We look forward to learning more about the potential of this technology in 2023.
For more content and search marketing insights, read another of our helpful articles on the It Works Media blog. Alternatively, contact us today to find out how we can help you with your next marketing strategy.